


it's a cold, cold place in the arms of a thief

by lagardère (laurore)



Category: The Terror (TV 2018)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Angst, Enemies to Lovers to Enemies to ?, Inception AU, M/M, Team Dynamics, basically the Inception premise, dream heists
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-07
Updated: 2020-06-07
Packaged: 2021-03-04 07:00:27
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 17,776
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24589468
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/laurore/pseuds/lagard%C3%A8re
Summary: Even before Solomon first joined Crozier’s team, he’d heard rumours about Edward Little.The kind of guy who got sponsored into the program. You know what that means, he’s either really talented or really connected.I heard his dreams look like a Cubist landscape, and they have the same palette, too, browns and greys. That’s why Crozier picked him as a point man: boring as fuck, with great organisational skills.I heard he only fucks in dreams. Never known a hand wasn’t his own, or a projection’s.
Relationships: Lt Edward Little/Sgt Solomon Tozer
Comments: 25
Kudos: 41





	it's a cold, cold place in the arms of a thief

**Author's Note:**

  * For [MissAntlers](https://archiveofourown.org/users/MissAntlers/gifts).



> you'd think i'd have learnt my lesson about spending time crafting extremely niche content !!!! i have not
> 
> i tried to make this accessible to people who haven't seen Inception without drowning the story in exposition; i'm not entirely sure i succeeded (as per the succinct Wikipedia summary of Inception: it's about people performing corporate espionage, using an experimental military technology that enables them to infiltrate their targets’ subconscious and extract information through a shared dream world)
> 
> happy birthday @MissAntlers, whose [art](https://flurgburgler.tumblr.com/post/615112573164093440/me-my-girl-have-been-spitballing-an-inception) for this story is to die for

_1\. Solomon_

Heather retrieves two beers from the fridge and hands one over. When they step out on the back porch, the sun has begun to set atop the hills. The landscape is one of pastures and copses, fair old England at its most peaceful, the sort of postcard prettiness that Heather used to talk about with longing when they were in the far north, even though he’d come from London, not some enchanted orchard.

“It’s been a while,” Heather says, as he settles in one of the deck chairs. “What have you been up to?”

Solomon removes a plastic knight from the other chair before he sits down.

“You know. Work. I’m no longer with the same people... Trying out a new team. We’ll see how it turns out. I miss the Troop these days. It seems everything was easier back then.”

“Hardly felt easy at the time,” Heather says, though he doesn’t sound particularly bitter about it. They left the Royal Marines so long ago; sometimes Solomon doubts they’re the same people they were back then. Being a Marine was a commitment he reaffirmed daily, through discipline and training, and a decade on he couldn’t say what’s left of all that. A willingness to obey orders, maybe. An ability to dismantle certain types of IEDs, an instinct for tripwire, escape routes, and warnings delivered in a glance. An appetite for icy mountains and bumpy roads. The rest has whittled away; he wouldn’t dare claim himself to be a Royal Marine now. Besides they’d as good as cast him out.

“How’s the kids?” he asks.

“Rory’s joined the football team,” Heather says with a small smile of satisfaction. “I drive her to practice every week-end. She’ll run me ragged, that one… Her brother’s a lot less trouble. Likes to draw… But maybe all kids do at that age, I don’t know.”

“How old is he?”

Heather’s look is fond. “As their godfather, it might be a good idea to try and remember their birth dates, Solomon. Maybe if you stay long enough, you’ll run into them?”

“I doubt it.”

Solomon takes a swig of his beer. Somehow, it tastes exactly the right kind of flavourless - _American lager! tastes like dirty rain water or piss,_ Heather had said, the first time they’d set foot on the continent, a week maybe before they’d transferred north to join the dream-sharing program. They thought being selected for a training program overseas was an honour. Retrospectively, Solomon has to wonder what their command knew about the program, exactly.

Heather used to say he’d joined the corps because he knew he wouldn’t succeed in his chosen field of “charming the pants off people”. _Nonsense_ , Solomon would reply, looking down at him - Heather is perhaps a foot shorter - at his rough-hewn features and the coarse dark hair thinning over his brow and his good-natured smile. _You’re a handsome son of a bitch_. With Heather’s boundless patience and his quiet strength and optimism, Solomon used to think he couldn’t fail to outlast them all.

“I got to run,” he apologises, as he drains the last mouthful of beer and sets the bottle down between them. “Maybe I’ll see the kids next time.”

Heather’s hand is a steady pressure on his shoulder.

“You know you can come by whenever you like.”

The underground room smells of antiseptic and faintly of damp. Solomon sits up in the reclining chair, letting his eyes readjust to the gloom.

“Back next month?” the chemist asks, as he removes the needle from Solomon’s arm.

Solomon looks beside him, at the blinking, buzzing, dripping apparatus that keeps Heather’s body alive, even as his mind continues to wander, so deeply ensconced in its five-year-old dream that nothing will wake him up and convince him that the life he’s dreamt for himself down there isn’t real. _What’s the point?_ he wants to ask. It would be easy to pull the plug. A mercy, maybe. If Solomon had been the one who’d become trapped in his own head, wouldn’t he have wanted Heather to let him die?

But he pays the chemist as he always does, with a hefty handful of dollar bills.

“Got a job coming up,” he says. “But I’ll be back, in three or four months.”

On his way out of the chemist’s cellar, he passes other dreamers. Most of them don’t get to dream in private like Heather does, but are hooked together to the same silver PASIV case, the portable device pumping enough sedatives in their veins to keep them under for hours.

There’s only two kinds of dreamers, Solomon has learned. The addicts, those who come back every day, who’ll end up like Heather someday, unable to tell the difference between dreams and reality. And the soon-to-be addicts, who come by every once in a while, thinking they’ll treat themselves to a brief trip down an imaginary street or to a brief journey to some distant country that they’d never get to visit otherwise. On the stairs, Solomon steps aside to let a scrawny kid go down, and the boy smiles at him, all wide-eyed, and says, “It’s my first time. Is it as good as they say?”

“It’s my job,” Solomon says. “I don’t get to enjoy the sights.” Maybe the kid’s been impressed by his brusque tone, or maybe he’s taken another look at Solomon in the blinking neon above the staircase, at his muscular frame under the bulky jacket and at his grim expression - seeing his oldest friend plunged into a dream-induced coma rarely puts him in the best of moods - but his crestfallen face is pitiful enough that Solomon unearths the old saying him and Heather and the rest of the lab rats of the program used to call out to each other, back in that military compound under the ice, in the Canadian far north.

“Beware of the old hag,” he says.

The boy blinks those big eyes at him.

“The old hag?”

“The boogeyman. The nightmares. Just watch out for yourself, kid.”

“Young?” The chemist calls from the bottom of the stairs, and the kid hurries off to answer that eerily-fitting surname.

When Solomon emerges into a side street in Battersea, the sky is a polluted, hazy navy blue. Young’s eagerness dogs his steps all the way to the underground.

By the end of the program, Solomon and Heather had seen all manners of mental carnage, waging war in devastated dreamscapes while people in lab coats took notes on the sidelines. The scientists measured the impact of dreamt wounds on their physical bodies (substantial enough that one of the women in Solomon’s unit lost both legs in a dream and never walked again once she’d woken up, never mind that her legs were still attached to her body). They measured the amount of sedative needed to keep them in a dream for hours or days; and the necessary stimuli to get them out: when the sedative was mild, a simple jolt would suffice, the so-called kick - but when the dosage was stronger, the only way to wake up was to die in the dream. And near the end of the program, once the lab became confident enough to launch more daring experiments, they tested the ability of a soldier to infiltrate another one’s dreams and ransack them.

Before the recruits exited the program, they had to undertake a final evaluation with a therapist. The therapist went through the reports of Solomon’s training, picking out seemingly random occurrences to ask if they’d been real or imagined. _Did you sprain your ankle, or did you dream you had? Did you strangle the soldier guarding the fenced outpost, or did you dream you had? Were you shot in the shoulder trying to ford a river, or did it happen in a dream?_ For a while, Solomon thought the evaluation was a formality, until the therapist asked, offhandedly, “What about this evaluation? Is it really taking place, or is it taking place inside your head?”

Much like Solomon had been taught, he tried to retrace his steps. He could remember coming into the building. Before that, he’d been in his room, waiting to be called to this evaluation. Before that… He must have woken up. Showered. Swung by the mess hall for breakfast. He had no memory of that.

 _Unreal,_ he said, and passed the test.

The dream-sharing program was interrupted only months after he’d left the compound in Nunavut, for reasons that had more to do with the cost of the operation than with its lack of ethics. What are we going to do now? Solomon had wondered aloud, and Heather had told him, We’ll just go back to the way it was before. We’ll fight real wars.

Solomon should have known, even then, that things would turn out the way they did. Heather was already very good at lying to himself, pretending that there was a way to walk back from what they’d seen, from dying a thousand times in a thousand dreams that felt so real Solomon could taste the blood in his mouth each time he woke up. Meanwhile, he’d barely been discharged that he’d already accepted a job offer from a team of private contractors to keep doing what he’d become so very good at: raiding people’s dreams, dismantling whatever defences they had in order to steal their ideas and their secrets.

 _I make my own decisions,_ he’d tried to explain to Heather, on his last visit before this one, before everything went haywire. _I’m not anyone’s experiment. It’s a good job and it pays well._

 _You can tell yourself whatever makes you feel good,_ Heather had pointed out, lying in that same deck chair on the back porch, wearing a truly horrible pair of tortoise-shell sunglasses that he’d borrowed from his imaginary wife. _Whatever helps you sleep at night._

In five years it was the closest Solomon ever came to snapping at him. _Some of us do have to deal with the real world._ But the last time he’d tried to talk some sense into Heather, the dream had almost collapsed around them and the chemist had been adamant that any misstep on Solomon’s part, any attempt to cause Heather’s brain to catch up with the state of his comatose body, would cause him not to wake up, but to flatline. So he’d held his tongue, and he’d taken a firm resolution to space out his visits.

Lately he’s starting to feel like they no longer know each other - like his friend has become as much a product of his imagination as he’s become an occasional prop in Heather’s reassuring dreamscape.

_2\. Edward_

The Fitzjames job is what they call a “background check”. Crozier’s former team had conducted such extractions for big corporations and mob bosses alike - and as they’d found out, there’s little difference between the mind of a ruthless CEO and that of a powerful criminal. Those missions used to be the easiest: they don’t exactly involve any sort of theft, but rather imply putting the mark in an imaginary situation where the extractor can test their loyalty to the team’s client.

Those missions used to be the easiest, but that was with the old team.

“If you’re going to share your dreams with people, you want to know them inside out,” Crozier had told Edward, years ago, and yet somehow neither Crozier nor Edward, as his point man and, by extension, the sole equivalent to an HR department in their business endeavour, had realised that part of their team was so disgruntled as to make off in the middle of an operation, stealing the information Crozier had come to retrieve, the location of the blueprints of a plane, and destabilising the dream to the extent that Crozier missed the wake-up call. By the time he finally managed to reemerge, more than an hour later, he’d spent five years in the dream.

“It’s just a background check,” Crozier reminds Edward.

When he wants to, Crozier can be soft-voiced, encouraging and impossibly patient. Not with Edward. If Edward wanted to count the number of times Crozier’s been kind or understanding with him, he’d probably have enough of the one hand.

“I know you mean well,” Crozier says, in a more subdued tone. “But I need you to stop questioning my every decision, Edward. We can’t afford another mutiny so I need you, as my right-hand man, to back me up. And to believe me. We can trust these people. This is a good team.”

Edward wonders if Crozier is aware of the contradiction inherent to his speech: one of the reasons why they lost three members of their team to a mutiny was because they’d been too trusting. Not so much of their forger, as forgers are liars by profession and Crozier had never trusted Cornelius Hickey farther than he could throw him, but of the others, Charles and Solomon, whom they’d been reluctant to believe would throw their lot in with Hickey.

“This is a good team,” Crozier repeats, with a pointed nod at the expanse of warehouse behind Edward.

Edward turns around obligingly. Their new chemist has been asked to come up with a “safer” sedative, in Crozier’s words, which will diminish the risk of them falling asleep and never waking up, a Herculean task he’d accepted in good cheer. At present however, he’s deep in conversation with their new architect, pointing at a cross-section of an opera house that Silna has pinned up on a corkboard. That’s about the extent of their furniture at present: corkboards, chairs, two PASIV devices stowed away in their silver cases for trial-runs, a 3-D printer for Silna’s models, and whatever’s left of the warehouse’s previous function, rusting machinery and tool cases, rotting directories in what used to be the foreman’s office, which they didn’t try to repurpose after Edward took a look inside and decided he wouldn’t spend another two days bagging junk and clearing mouse droppings. Thomas Jopson, their forger, has gone off to pick-up their lunch at the closest deli.

“I’m not sure Jopson has as good an eye as Hickey did,” Edward says. “But he’s more convincing. Silna’s less… formal than Charles was. But that also means her dreamscapes will be more intricate, and more likely to fool our targets. And you said Goodsir trained with McDonald, so he couldn’t have had a better teacher.”

To be entirely accurate, they hadn’t merely lost the three mutineers in that failed mission; they’d also lost McDonald, whom Crozier will readily say was the best chemist he’s ever worked with, and who’d decided to retire after the mutiny, not that Edward can blame him. And they’d lost the back-up Edward had brought in to help with the logistics and conceptualisation of the dream. John was a mathematician by training and one of the most reliable people Edward knew, but he’d had such a bad run-in with Hickey in the dream that he’d sworn off dream-sharing entirely. Edward hasn’t seen him since.

A cursory glance at Crozier is enough to take in the deep shadows under his clear eyes and the fair stubble along his jaw. Crozier’s a sturdy man, with a round head on a thick chest and a pair of strong hands Edward’s never hesitated to put his life into, but lately he’s taken to walking with a more ponderous gait and sometimes Edward catches him blinking and staring around him like he doesn’t quite know where he is. Spending years trapped in a dream will do this to you.

“Is this your professional assessment?” Crozier asks.

Edward sighs. “I suppose it is.”

“And your personal assessment?”

By the corkboard, Goodsir is pointing at some feature of the opera house. Silna answers his query quietly, pulling a pencil out of her pocket to annotate the map.

“They’re good people,” Edward says. “Maybe that’s not what we need to pull off the kind of con job we’re getting paid to do, but it’s definitely what we need after the last time. And the last team.”

Crozier hums in assent. Again his gaze grows wistful.

“We used to be builders and explorers. Now all we do is corporate espionage.”

Edward refrains from pointing out that he’s never been much of an adventurer. As far as he’s concerned, what makes him a good point man is precisely his lack of imagination and his obedience to the rules.

“There’s still a faint margin for creativity,” he says instead, nodding towards Silna’s maps. “Should we go have a look at her maze?”

 _It’s just a background check,_ he tries to remind himself as he follows Crozier to the corkboard. It wouldn’t do to let his pessimism get the better of him, when so much of this mission rests on efficient, clear-headed planning.

In the end, the Fitzjames job is simpler than Edward expected it to be. They’ve been in the dream for about twenty minutes when James Fitzjames corners Crozier in a bathroom in the background of a glittering party, and gives away far more information than Crozier could ever have wanted.

“Not a deceitful bone in the man’s body,” Crozier says, with something akin to wonder, as he joins Edward at the edge of the ballroom. In front of them, couples revolve in an echo of the waltz Fitzjames attended a few months ago for John Franklin’s thirty-year wedding anniversary. The people dancing are projections of Fitzjames’ subconscious. There isn’t a single person in this room who doesn’t look dazzling, perhaps as a result of Fitzjames’ impostor’s syndrome. The dancers are bedecked in fine evening wear, skin-tight dresses and billowing skirts and embroidered suits, jewellery glinting in the light of the chandeliers, reflected by the mirrors on the walls. Yet even among such a crowd Fitzjames stands out, a tall man with a stern face in an elegant dress of dark red velvet that wouldn’t have been out of place on an old Hollywood movie set.

“You gave him your real name,” Edward remarks.

“Eavesdropping on us, were you?” Crozier quips, Irish accent surfacing as always when he’s caught by surprise.

“It’s my job.”

Crozier’s eyes narrow and Edward catches himself wondering how much he might have had to drink. It used to be an issue, long before the mutiny. It might have precipitated it; but Crozier doesn’t drink anymore, and what would it matter in a dream, where the only drinks they ingest are imaginary, and the taste of the alcohol is down to their minds’ ability to recreate it from memory?

“What did you hear?” Crozier asks.

“ _I’m not a fraud, Francis_ ,” Edward repeats, diligently. “A dangerous gamble.”

“He won’t remember me by the time he wakes up,” Crozier scoffs. “Isn’t that part of what makes me a good extractor, that I’m not a very memorable person? What matters is that the job is done. John Franklin will be pleased to hear that his chosen heir is entirely reliable. I suggest we let the dream run its course.”

“What about the other setting that we’d…”

“Forget about it. I have what we need. When’s the kick? An hour from now? You go enjoy the party, Edward.”

“I don’t dance,” Edward mutters, rather resentfully, to Crozier’s retreating back.

Edward has had a question on his mind throughout the mission but he waits until it is over to ask it - until they’ve removed the needle from Fitzjames’ arm and left him to enjoy his drugged sleep in a suite at the Savoye, until they’ve informed John Franklin, CEO of Polar Energies, that Fitzjames is unquestionably loyal to him and his firm, until they’re back at the warehouse and the rest of the team has gone home, Harry Goodsir to Greenwich, Thomas Jopson to Marylebone, Silna to Canada. The desks and maps and corkboards have disappeared and it’s only Crozier and Edward standing here, like they were at the end of the last mission, except Hickey had stolen their spare PASIV case and Crozier was still grappling with the fact that the last five years had happened entirely inside his head.

“You did it on me, didn’t you?” Edward says.

“Did what?”

Edward nods towards the warehouse.

“A background check. I wish I had some memory of it. I’d like to know what kind of setting you picked. Who questioned me. Was it you? Was it John?”

Crozier smiles at him, his usual bitter smile.

“I never did a background check on you, Edward. I know your nature. How long have we worked together? We’d never have got this far if we didn’t trust each other, and that’s all the proof I need.”

Edward casts about for something else to say, anxious to hide how much Crozier’s words have moved him.

“I think this was the first time we didn’t get shot at on the job,” he remarks. “By a mark or their projections or our own team.”

“Which proves my point,” Crozier frowns. “We don’t need to hire another ex-military contractor who’ll turn every mission into a combat zone.”

Edward nods, his fingers closing around the bullet in his pocket. It was Crozier who’d first taught him about totems. _A small object that only you will know the weight and shape of, that’ll behave differently in dreams so that you can always tell your dreams apart from reality._ Before the mutiny, Edward’s totem had been an old compass that he’d inherited from his older brother, the hands of which would spin relentlessly whenever he was in a dream. Since the mutiny, he’s replaced it with the bullet he couldn’t use on the mutineers, and in dreams it becomes heavier, a weight of lead in his pocket and a constant reminder of his misplaced trust.

“You should go home,” Crozier says. “Get some rest. Go see that play at the Barbican.” Crozier is one of the only two people who knows Edward’s address, and he’s always been good at using these tidbits of knowledge about his team to show them that he cares about them. “What was it again, Shakespeare?”

“Richard II.”

“Ah,” Crozier says, and intones, “ _For heaven’s sake let us sit upon the ground, and tell sad stories of the death of kings…_ You would like it.”

“Maybe,” Edward says, hesitant as always.

He hasn’t told Crozier that on one of their trial-runs for the Fitzjames job, a couple weeks ago, one of Jopson’s projections had pointed a rifle at him and Edward had taken a bullet to the shoulder because he’d fully expected Solomon to shove him aside. Sometimes, when he moves too fast, he can feel an ache in his shoulder, like an echo of that imaginary wound. Much like the bullet in his pocket, it’s another reminder of Solomon’s betrayal, this one hidden right underneath his skin.

_3\. Solomon_

He takes another sip of his whiskey. In the mirror behind the bar, he can keep an eye on the other patrons, though for the most part he’s been content to swirl the drink in his glass without paying much attention to what was happening behind him. The decor is extravagant, something like the inside of a submarine as they might have dreamt it two centuries ago, all shiny copper plating and unexplained rudders, barometers and compasses and sections of pipes repurposed as vases. The drinks are fine but the food isn’t, Des Voeux never got around to fixing the finest details of the dreamscape and the menu will just display whatever you last had to eat. In this case, it’s the tomato and mozzarella sandwich Solomon had for lunch, displayed five times in a row in embossed, gothic script on thick white paper.

“What are you having?” Edward asks, leaning against the bar, and when Solomon has nodded towards the bottle of whiskey Edward invokes the waiter with a discrete flick of the wrist. The gesture is so familiar it makes Solomon ache.

“Two more,” Edward orders, his hand settling at the small of Solomon’s back.

Hunched over his bar stool, Solomon wishes he could convince his brain that there really is alcohol in this drink. That there really is a drink in this glass. Edward’s cuffs fall short of his wrists and it makes him want to lean down, kiss that blue-veined strip of skin, chase the scent of Edward’s skin along his wrist bones. When Edward turns towards him, that fine mouth grazing his ear, Solomon closes his eyes in rapture.

“I’ve missed you,” Edward says. “Come with me.”

“Where?”

“We’ll find a room. Upstairs. Nobody has to know you made a detour. I’ll get down on my hands and knees for you. It’ll be just like it used to be.”

Solomon opens his eyes and forces himself to straighten up, booted feet kicking against the copper front of the bar.

“I’ll make you pay for this.”

Cornelius laughs. When he reappears in Solomon’s field of vision, he’s still wearing Edward’s clothes, the grey vest and the shirt so white and crisp it almost hurts the eye.

“What gave me away? The sex thing? I figured that must have been how he liked it.”

“The voice,” Solomon grumbles. “You’ve always been shite at accents.”

“How dare you. I’m the best forger in the business.” Cornelius’ smile springs so often to his lips it might as well be a reflexive twitch. When he speaks again, he sounds uncharacteristically serious. “You’ll never make a perfect forgery, Solomon. You don’t really understand what it means... You don’t have the eye or the patience or the guts for it. Sometimes that’s all it takes, a wild bluff.” He knocks back his glass of mock whiskey. “Come on, let’s go. We have a job to do.”

Being on Cornelius’ team is nothing like working with Crozier. Gibson’s a decent point man but he’s no Edward, he’s dedicated but slow, and Cornelius decided early on that what their team had to offer was efficiency. Swiftness and a whole lot of nerve. They’ve extracted most of their intel from half-finished dreams: a disused factory where the machinery kept glitching, vanishing in and out of sight (Cornelius posing as the lover of a mobster’s right-hand, so that the mobster could know which ones of his trusted lieutenants were plotting against him); a street in New Orleans, the ironwork of the balconies melting into licorice-like ribbons (Cornelius posing as a young chemist’s father, in order to steal a formula for a rival pharmaceutical company); a harbour slowly sinking into the sea (Cornelius posing as the daughter of a journalist, getting him to open up about his past wrongs in order to undermine his upcoming exposé about a wealthy producer).

It isn’t rare for the mark’s subconscious to catch on that something isn’t right - it’s difficult not to when the architecture starts to slant like the tower of Pisa, Des Voeux can be exhaustingly precise about certain details and infuriatingly cavalier about others, that’s how he’d fucked up the balconies in that street in NOLA while replicating every shelf of the New Orleans Pharmacy Museum down to the last jar, despite the fact that Cornelius and the young chemist never made it to the museum, stopping instead at a bar further up along the street.

But it’s precisely because they work like this, because Cornelius wants every mission to be a feat of bravado and because Gibson’s research is never done in time and because Des Voeux will always see the tree and never the goddamn forest, that they need Solomon’s abilities. Because once the mark’s projections stop wandering around and begin shooting, it becomes vital to have a mercenary on the team.

“We work better and faster,” Cornelius had told him. ( _Than Crozier ever did,_ he implied.) “We make more money.” ( _You were right to come along._ ) “We’re the best team in the business, and we get to dream for a living.” ( _There’s no need to regret your previous employment._ )

“We’ll go over these blueprints one last time, and then you’ll dream us a bathhouse, Solomon, how does that sound?”

In the bathhouse Cornelius and Gibson had wandered off to fuck in the changing rooms, the sullen architect and the pale-faced, fidgety chemist had rendered themselves half-comatose in the sauna, and Solomon had stepped outside, and because it was his dream, the landscape around the bathhouse was the kind of pine forest that him and Edward used to dream about, back when they were playing with the idea of retiring from this job one day, of heading as far away from dreams as they could, _We could head north,_ Edward used to say, _where the forests end and the tundra begins._

“Couldn’t you have dreamt us someplace more cheerful?” Des Voeux had called out from the porch of the bathhouse. “A city. Some sunshine. What is this, Alaska?”

Even before Solomon first joined Crozier’s team, he’d heard rumours about Edward Little.

_The kind of guy who got sponsored into the program. You know what that means, he’s either really talented or really connected._

_I heard his dreams look like a Cubist landscape, and they have the same palette, too, browns and greys. That’s why Crozier picked him as a point man: boring as fuck, with great organisational skills._

_I heard he only fucks in dreams. Never known a hand wasn’t his own, or a projection’s._

Working with Edward had meant proving and disproving these rumours, gradually over the course of several years. You can’t spend time in someone’s dreams and not wake up with some idea of them as a person. As it turned out, Edward had both a wealth of talent and a wealth of contacts, and it wasn’t rare that he’d be the one bringing in the contracts.

Crozier meanwhile knew all the particulars of dream-sharing; he was endlessly patient and could work a mark for days in a dream, and he’d come up with the most stunning architectural mazes to trap the mark into. Des Voeux worked well with Crozier because he was only called in to tinker the particulars of a dream Crozier had pretty much put together. But Crozier didn’t have much of a head for business and he was anything but a people person, and he needed Edward’s research and planning, and Cornelius’ ability to get under a mark’s skin and manipulate their emotions.

“How dare you. I’m the best forger in the business,” Cornelius says, at the bar of the submarine-like restaurant, as he knocks back his glass of mock whiskey. “Come on, let’s go. We have a job to do.”

Solomon follows him towards the staircase. Upstairs is a private room where the mission will take place. Cornelius’ silhouette shifts as he walks, and by the time he reaches the staircase, he’s no longer Cornelius but the mark’s favourite uncle.

Solomon pulls the compass out of his pocket and checks the ever-revolving needle. It used to be that his totem was a penknife, until he’d stolen this one. Totems are supposed to be mementos, after all, and the compass is more of a memento to him than the penknife ever was.

Another two jobs, and he’ll have enough money to ensure Heather is looked after for as long as his brain continues to function. Chemists will keep plying him with Somnacin and maybe he’ll get to see his imaginary children grow up. Another two jobs and Solomon can retire, and the needle of this compass will never move again.

“Let’s go over it one more time,” Cornelius decides, as he steps into the darkened forest at the top of the stairs. “We want her to be terrified.”

The mission is simple: figuring out the political strategies of an environmental lobby. The mark is the lobby’s young president; the client, an oil company. Des Voeux’s muddled architecture may even be of use to them this time around; the more ill-defined the forest will be, the better.

This is perhaps the main difference between Crozier’s approach to dreams, and Cornelius’: Cornelius isn’t afraid to deal in nightmares.

_4\. Edward_

The first time it happens, they’re in between contracts, and dreaming for the sake of it.

Silna wanted to test the lay-out of a new maze, where the streets of a village were meant to make you walk in circles, bringing you back to your starting point no matter which turn you took. Edward agreed to be the dreamer in this experiment, and for a while this merely involves a wander down a sidestreet in his shirtsleeves, enjoying the improbably Mediterranean sun, watching the ruffled tops of orange trees above the garden walls, the lacework of their leaves superimposed on the clear blue of the sky. He’s almost at the end of the street when he hears the echo of footsteps in his wake. Already he’s run into the others several times, Harry lounging on a balcony, Silna and Crozier talking on an empty piazza, Thomas sitting at the terrace of a cafe among several projections, testing how far he can go in his interactions with them before Edward’s subconscious rebels against the intrusion. When Edward turns around however, it’s not a member of the team behind him but Solomon, dressed for the weather in a light shirt and linen trousers, nothing Solomon would ever wear, and Edward knows it must be a projection, that there’s no way Solomon would have found the warehouse and hooked himself into Edward’s PASIV case and Edward’s dream.

Still, he panics.

They all wake up moments later - hours early - when a gigantic wave submerges the village and brings the dream to an abrupt end. Harry goes on choking for several seconds after he wakes up, as if his brain can’t comprehend the absence of water down his throat.

Almost at once, Crozier is at Edward’s side.

“What happened?”

“A strange projection,” Edward says, rubbing his forehead as if that will somehow erase the lingering afterimage of Solomon’s broad shoulders and tanned skin, of his hair tinged auburn by the summer sun. “An old memory. It won’t happen again.”

It does happen again, on seven separate occasions over the next few weeks.

Sometimes, the Solomon in Edward’s dreams is dressed like the man Edward knew outside of work, with far more of an eye to practicality than elegance. Sometimes his clothes fit his surroundings: a suit at a reception, or cam whites when Silna builds them a dream in her Arctic homeland - a relic of the Arctic warfare training he used to tell Edward about with something like reverence ( _Have you ever tried skiing by minus twenty degrees while being tied to the back of an armoured vehicle?_ ). The projection Edward is most afraid of is the man wearing army fatigues, with a shapeless bag slung over his shoulder and too much beard. This is the Solomon Tozer Edward had picked up from St Pancras to take him to meet Crozier for the first time, who’d looked at him with an appraising stare, and who’d asked, as they were about to part ways outside the restaurant where Crozier waited, _What’re you hiding under all that, the waistcoats, the pressed trousers? A real man made of bone and muscle or do you just... stuff your clothes with spreadsheets?_

After the first time, Edward learns to keep it together. His projections of Solomon are content with staying on the margins of his dreams. They never try to interact with him. It’s not unheard of for projections to assume the shape of someone the dreamer has met before. It’s not necessarily an issue that needs to be resolved. He needn’t mention it to Crozier.

After Solomon’s defection, and despite how little he wanted to reminisce, Edward had tried to evaluate the situation, to decide if he had anything to worry about. Solomon does know things about him that hardly anybody else knows, including Edward’s private address. But in return, he’d been generous with his secrets. Solomon was part of the first experiences in dream-sharing, _the first in line and the first cut down_ , as he put it. Edward knows he has a friend in a cellar in Battersea, a man who’s been under so deep and for so long that he’ll only stop dreaming when he dies. As long as Edward doesn’t act upon that knowledge, he sees no immediate reason why Solomon should come after him, or give Hickey the means to do so.

Besides, Edward likes his flat in the Barbican Estate, and would rather not move out.

So while he never thought he was entirely safe, he was also ready to accept that risk was a part of his work, and he was resigned to deal with an attack if and when it came. He would never have thought that the danger wouldn’t come from Solomon, but from his own mind.

It was supposed to be a run-of-the-mill mission. Not a background check, but standard information theft: put the mark in the dream, place a vault somewhere in the dream, and the mark’s mind will fill it with whatever secrets the team needs to steal. Silna had recreated a succession of streets in downtown New York and the club where the mark often spent his nights. Edward was to lead the mark upstairs to the vault.

He’s been waiting about an hour in the crowded nightclub when Solomon appears at his side, his white t-shirt bright in the dark, a braided crown of glow-sticks atop his head. The bartender stops beside them long enough to pour them both a shot of fluorescent vodka. Edward doesn’t give himself time to think before he swallows the shot, his eyes shut tight against the sharp, punishing burn of it.

“What do you say we run away when this is over?” the projection of Solomon shouts above the deafening techno. “Stop dreaming, try to give the real world a shot?”

 _Just the once,_ Edward tells himself.

He’s got to give it to Silna. Solomon’s grin tastes like vodka, and the only unrealistic thing about the whole scene is the way that crown on his head keeps shining long after it should have died out. Reaching for Solomon’s waist his hand fumbles into the path of the knife in Solomon’s hand.

“This is how you see me,” Solomon tells him, as the knife sinks between Edward’s fingers and then between his ribs.

Behind him the scene descends into chaos. Suddenly every projection in the club is holding a gun and they’re still firing when Edward falls - and dies - and wakes up.

Death is how it had all started: the longer the dream, the stronger the dosage of Somnacin, and death is often the surest way to wake up from such dreams before one’s mind becomes stranded, as had happened to Solomon’s friend.

Early on, Edward and Solomon had taken the habit of dispatching each other, maybe because they didn’t quite get along, or maybe because they knew they could rely on each other - that they’d get along if only they tried. In dreams, Edward has shot Solomon and shoved him off buildings and one time he slit his throat with a kitchen knife because that was all they had, and that was the time Solomon went from being “Sergeant Tozer” to “Solomon”, in the bathroom of the train after they’d left the mark’s compartment in first-class, Solomon telling Edward to quit calling him Sergeant unless it got him hard, Edward utterly incapable of humour in the aftermath of the mission, kissing the invisible line where the imaginary knife had slashed across Solomon’s throat.

“I’m not replacing you,” Crozier tells Edward. “You should see this as a break. A holiday.”

Edward would have to be an idiot to take such a statement at face value. It’s a testament to how worried Crozier must be that for the first time since they started working together seven years ago, he’s treating Edward like one.

“We’re about to start this new job for the Barrows. Who’s going to play point for you on that one?”

“I asked John,” Crozier says. After a second he adds, “I asked him two weeks ago. I could tell something was wrong.”

“John,” Edward repeats. “You sent him on a break slash holiday six months ago, and if I’m not mistaken we haven’t seen him since. It’s just… it’s just a stupid projection.” He steeples his hands over his nose, his eyes shut against the dusty light. “I can deal with this.”

“I know.” Crozier gives his knee a comforting pat. “In due time.”

Edward meets most of his contacts in a dingy pub in the East End, where he knows the owner, the three barmaids, the two service exits and every side street, unlocked door and sewer grate within a two mile radius. Silna finds him there two days after their failed mission. She takes a look at Edward’s teacup and orders them two whiskeys on the rocks.

“It’s so easy to create things in dreams,” Edward tells her. “I won’t pretend I can do it half as well as you do, but making things is the easy part. How do you not dream about something? How do you not think about someone? Once the thought’s in your head, how the hell do you dislodge it?”

“My advice?” Silna leans back against her chair, her dark eyes steady on Edward’s pale face. “Find someone else. Isn’t that how it usually works?”

“I tried,” Edward says; and leaves it at that. It feels unnecessary to elaborate on the long list of exes and one-time flings he’s reactivated since Solomon’s projection first made an appearance.

“I wasn’t directly part of the military program,” Silna says. “But I was born in Qikiqtarjuaq, the community closest to the base where you received your training. I wasn’t trained as an architect, like your previous architect. I was brought in when the program was being dismantled, to study the instability of dreams. And the main conclusion we came to is that every dream is haunted.”

“Haunted?”

“One of the first things they teach you is that you can only control so much in a shared dream. We build the bare bones, and then your subconscious does the rest. From the very beginning, there were ghosts everywhere. Ghosts, spirits. You can’t rationalise all the things that you see in a dream, no matter what psychology would have you believe.”

“You’re talking about nightmares,” Edward says with a mirthless smile.

“Nightmares, maybe. The things that visit you in your sleep, the old hag that sits on your chest during an episode of sleep paralysis.”

“You’re talking about fear,” Edward says. “Crozier saw something like that, when Hickey trapped him in that dream. Some sort of nightmare. I caught glimpses of it a few times, when I was deep under. Most people who’ve been dreaming a while have. I think that’s what you mean by ghost. I always assumed it was some… foretaste. Of what death will be like. That’s not what my problem is. I’m not haunted by death. Someone’s in my head, and I need him out.”

“Crozier isn’t wrong,” Silna remarks. “Time might be the answer.”

“Time and a strong drink,” Edward says, raising his glass. “And lest this should make me sound ungrateful, I do appreciate you coming over.”

Silna smiles.

“We have to help each other, don’t we? As people who share the same dreams. As a team.”

“I’ll toast to that,” Edward says, because he does want to trust her, in spite of what happened the last time he bought into Crozier’s enthusiastic views of dream-sharing as a team-building exercise.

What Edward won’t admit to, not after that first shared drink, nor after the two drinks that follow, is that a day after Crozier had sent him home and confiscated his PASIV device, he’d run into Solomon in some hole-in-the-wall, drug-dealing den in Whitechapel that also dabbled in dream-sharing.

He’d thought it was a projection at first, and even for a while after he woke up, he had his doubts. It wasn’t so much that he thought Solomon wouldn’t know where to find him. What seemed absurd was that Solomon would have come all this way to offer him a job, as if he really thought there was a point to that, as if he believed Edward might turn against Crozier.

 _Could use a pointman, and you’ve got the most experience in the business_ , he’d said.

 _That’s only because most of the old timers are dead,_ Edward had pointed out.

 _Come with us, lieutenant,_ Solomon said, and he must have seen something in Edward’s face, whatever it was that this rare use of his meaningless rank had brought to the surface, because he insisted, _Do you really think you can trust Crozier? Do you know he’s been doing business with one of your marks behind your back? Business and pleasure, if Hickey’s to be believed. James Fitzjames, does the name ring a bell? Word on the street is that your boss is going to quit, and he’s going to do it quickly and quietly. He’s going to leave you a big losing hand, Edward._

Edward had leaned in for a kiss as he pulled out his gun, his other hand ready to parry Solomon’s knife, but there’d been no knife that time, no blade slicing through his palm as he pulled the trigger, only Solomon’s soft sound of surprise as the bullet found its way to his heart.

 _You should be used to it, by now,_ Edward had told him. _Every night since you left, I kill you in my dreams._

But Sol’s warm body had already slumped to the ground, and it was only once Edward was back in the dim, underground bar, hooked to an IV that had seen better days, that he considered the fact that it may have been Solomon himself this time around, and not a product of his feverish mind.

_It’s our dreams that make monsters of us_ , he thinks.

_5\. Solomon_

Lately Cornelius has taken to holding as many meetings as he can in dreams rather than out of them. “That way we won’t be overheard,” he says, although he doesn’t say by whom. Maybe he means his own team. Quite often someone will be left out, generally the chemist, Hodgson. On paper Hodgson is the perfect fit for the job: a man with an extensive knowledge of drugs who’d do anything Cornelius asks him to. But Hodgson is also shifty-eyed and nervous, and nostalgic of the simpler life he aspired to until he dilapidated his inherited wealth. Eventually he’ll snap and make some dramatic mistake that will put all of them at risk.

Whenever the pace lets on and Solomon gets a second to look around him, it becomes apparent that the team that Cornelius once sold him as “the best people in the field” and “like-minded souls” and “the future of dream-sharing” is only hanging on by a thread.

Aside from Hodgson there’s Gibson, who is starting to develop the quirks Solomon had seen appear on far more resilient men during his days in the program: the walking-back-through-your-actions-out-loud to check you’re not in a dream, the constant handling of your totem because you have lost any other means of telling the difference between being awake and sleeping. Gibson’s totem is a plate ring that Cornelius gave him after he stole it from one of their first marks, which defeats the very idea of a totem (an object that you alone should know, so that no one can use it to trick you into confusing your dreams for reality). Solomon won’t be surprised if Cornelius eventually uses it against Gibson, whenever he decides he’s done with him.

And then there’s Des Voeux, whose mazes have only become sloppier since they left Crozier’s team, whose architecture is growing more grotesque by the dream, assisted in this by Cornelius’ extravagant personal taste. Tonight’s meeting takes place in some sort of theatre. The crudely-lit stage depicts a surgery, with a gurney and operating tools and a wide trail of blood leading from centre stage to stage right. The theatre itself could be mistaken for an old church, with its gothic doorways and gilded wooden angels and the boxes under the balcony that look like confessionals.

“What the fuck is this place?” Solomon mutters to Des Voeux as they walk down towards the first row of seats, where Hickey and Gibson are deep in conversation.

“The original Grand Guignol theatre in Paris,” Des Voeux says, like that’s something to be proud of. He has the kind of hard dark stare that makes him look arrogant when he doesn’t look angry. “He specifically requested that.”

“I’m getting tired of him treating these meetings as his fantasy playground,” Solomon grumbles, and promptly regrets it. He doesn’t trust Des Voeux; he knows better than to do so, or to express any distrust of Cornelius. Never mind Cornelius’ speeches when he was trying to convince them to strike out on their own - _Dreams have been the province of Crozier’s fancy little set for too long, wouldn’t you say? They’ll never see you as anything more than hired muscle. Even Little - you think you’re a team, the two of you, but what that means is that you take bullets for him… When did you last make your own decisions? -_ Solomon knows that their mutiny had its roots in Crozier’s dislike of Cornelius, and with everything he’s seen over the past few months, he’s starting to believe Crozier may have had a point.

“I have a new mission for us,” Cornelius announces, with his arms spread wide. With his reddish blond hair and that thin smile curving up towards his ears, he looks every bit like the sort of devil or madman who’d preside over a bloody stage in a churchlike theatre. “It’ll be slightly different from our usual fare. Our mark this time is none other than Francis Crozier.”

None of them express surprise at the news, and Solomon wishes he could tell if Gibson and Des Voeux’s lack of reaction was also the result of an attempt at self-preservation. Maybe Cornelius has already shared his plans with them. It’s something he used to do with Solomon - inviting him to share a dream in some setting he thought Solomon might like, some endless stretch of wild Canadian landscape from his days in the program or the familiar streets of Liverpool at dusk, the neighbourhood where he grew up with its smell of car exhaust and curry take-out and spilt beer, or something more intimate or at least Cornelius’ understanding of it, the corner booth at a pub with a pack of cigarettes on the table, and then he’d share the details of their next contract, _I’m not sharing it with the others yet but I want you to know,_ gloved fingers brushing against Solomon’s in a cold forest of firs - warm mouth exhaling smoke against Solomon’s neck on the banks of the Mersey - knees touching under the table at the pub - cautious always to make these overtures an offering rather than a demand, to show Solomon that this, all of this, from the secrets they shared to the missions they chose to those dreamt fumbles that never left either of them quite satisfied (hands on each other’s cocks, Cornelius saying whatever came to his mind, _You could break me if you wanted, couldn’t you? Big as you are,_ slipping up sometimes because he knew it wouldn’t change a thing, _What happens if I tug your leash, will you bite me?_ ), this was what Solomon had wanted and chosen, in full knowledge of the cause.

“What information are we after?” Solomon asks, when it becomes clear nobody else will. “Crozier’s mind won’t be easy to crack.”

“Well, as you know, when we destabilised the dream on our last mission with Crozier’s team, he became trapped deep inside it,” Cornelius explains pleasantly. “From what I’ve been told, he spent at least several years down there, if not decades. I want to access what happened during those years. I think he found something that could be of use to us.”

“When we left we said we wouldn’t do that again,” Solomon feels obligated to point out. “The sedatives were far too strong, Crozier got trapped far too deep. It’s too risky.”

“The dream won’t be unstable with the right dreamer,” Cornelius says. “It was unstable because we made it so. And as for the sedatives, it’s a matter of fixing the dosage. With the right chemist…”

Solomon frowns. “I knew guys who went too deep. Some died instead of waking up. Some are still under, and it’s been years. I don’t know what Crozier saw down there. I don’t want to see it for myself. You can’t guarantee we’d get out again.”

“I don’t want us to end up in a coma,” Cornelius says, with exaggerated patience. “I want us to do what we usually do: extract information from a mark. Crozier will tell us where to find what I’m after. We’ll find it. And then… I can promise you, the world will be ours for the taking. Now tell me, have I ever let you down so far?”

His gaze sweeps over them, lingering on Solomon’s dull expression.

“Charles, Billy, we have another ten minutes left before we wake up. Could you go take a look backstage, and report on the spare settings, the props? If we can make the wings as convincing as the front stage, we could probably use this setting for a future mission. I’m quite fond of it. Solomon, a word.”

Once the others have left, following the blood trail which by now has turned a dull brown, Cornelius drops down into the velvet seat at Solomon’s side, chin propped upon a pale hand.

“What’s got into you? You’ve never had any trouble telling your dreams apart from reality.” His fingers tap lightly against Solomon’s leg, an inch away from the compass in his pocket. “You’re the most grounded dreamer I know, it’s what I like about you. So what’s got you spooked?”

“There’s things down there you don’t want to meddle with. The deeper you go… Everyone had the same stories, of being stalked by shadows… It doesn’t matter how _grounded_ you think you are.”

“Shadows,” Cornelius repeats. “Well, I will take this into account. Are you still in touch with Crozier’s drug supplier? What was his name. The sulky boy.”

“Bobby Golding. Yeah. Yeah, I am.”

“Get in touch with him for me, will you?”

Solomon leans over the railing, looking down at the pond scum below. Edward’s neighbourhood could be a dream for how alien it looks. Brutalist high-rises riddled with windows and dented with balconies stand alongside the horizontal slabs of apartment blocks arranged in squares. There’s little escape for the eye once one has set foot inside their courtyards, where green water laps against concrete columns and red brick pathways. Des Voeux couldn’t come up with so perfect a maze. Every building looks the same and each of them houses hundreds of flats. Solomon knows better than to wander beneath Edward’s windows, so he chose another area of the same estate, but the scenery is near identical to the view from Edward’s flat, and that’s all he wanted: a pretence at being close, tricking himself into thinking he might go all the way to Edward’s building and, what, ring his doorbell? Slip a note inside his letterbox? _Cornelius Hickey is coming for Crozier. Be careful._

Either he believes Cornelius and all his tall tales, or he hedged his bets on the wrong horse, and the moment Cornelius goes down, Solomon will go down with him. Trying to quit would get him killed, whether in this life or in a dreamt up parody of it, and now that he’s standing here, it seems blatantly obvious that Edward won’t react kindly to any kind of message from him. After all, the last time they saw each other, Edward had little else but murder on his mind.

“So, d’you often bring blokes back home?” he’d asked, the first time Edward let him inside his flat. “What are the rules?”

The flat looked like Edward had ripped a page from a catalogue of strikingly modern interiors, with leather upholstery and overcrowded bookshelves and plants that rivaled the architecture with the geometry of their leaves. Solomon gazed down at the clear, spotless floorboards and began to unlace his boots.

“Sometimes,” Edward said. “I brought back a taxi driver last week. Around the time of your first mission with us, it was a dancer from the Royal Ballet... It lasted a week or two.”

“I’m not as special as I thought then,” Solomon joked, as he set his shoes down by the door, his muddy laces trailing on the floor.

“Nobody in the business knows where I live,” Edward told him, with that quiet brown gaze, so serious it was a wonder he wasn’t getting headaches from being so constantly alert. “Apart from Crozier, and now you.”

Later on, Solomon did run into the Royal Ballet dancer. He’d gone to Ukraine for a mess of a contract that he should never have accepted in the first place, and when he returned, he passed the guy on the stairs, his dark curls damp from a shower, his step light on the steps.

“We didn’t exactly discuss this,” Edward pointed out, as Solomon sat down at his kitchen table and glanced at the identical building across the courtyard, fully expecting to catch a flash of movement - the glint of a sniper’s scope. He hadn’t had time to recover after his mission, dream-sharing is a field that thrives on precipitation, on never slowing down to assess critical damage, and he’d taken a bullet to the knee in Odessa (all Eastern European dreamers have a way with guns) and he’d felt it all the way up the stairs, that ghostly ache like the dream wound was still there, fracture lines etched across his kneecap. By the time he’d come across the dancer, somewhere between the 5th and the 6th floor, he’d felt so faint he thought he might have to sit down on the steps.

“I don’t want you to fuck other people,” he said, through gritted teeth.

Edward took a sip of his coffee, and in that lapse of silence Solomon realised that he looked tired as well, with a line at the corner of his mouth, dark shadows under his eyes.

“Alright,” Edward said.

Solomon had noticed straight away, on the day Edward came to pick him up at the station to take him to Crozier, that part of what made Edward handsome was a sort of frailty. Edward used to make him think of those old explosives they’d found once at one of the old bases they canvased during his time in Norway, those sticks that had turned a strange colour with age and their exposure to the cold, around which Solomon’s group of trainees had established a vast perimeter until they could bring in an expert bomb-disposal team because there was a chance touching them with the tip of a gloved finger would set off the kind of explosion would raze the base to the ground.

Now he can only wonder what it means, that he was so quick to spot that fragility in Edward, and that he failed to notice it earlier in Cornelius, although if dreams have taught him something, it’s that often our minds will only show us only what we wanted to see.

_6\. Edward_

When Edward arrives at the warehouse, the vast, echoing building is empty, save for John Irving. Crozier’s substitute point man is lying on a purple yoga mat, fast asleep, the tell-tale tube running from his arm to the open PASIV case on the floor. The LED timer displays another ten minutes until the dream ends and John is scheduled to wake up.

Edward removes his coat and sits down cross-legged next to the case, keeping an eye on John’s sleeping form. He looks thinner than when Edward saw him last, the angle of his jaw more pronounced, but that might be because he’s shaved off his beard. It also makes him look far younger than his thirty-four years. Edward has known John since their twenties, when they were both fresh out of business school. They’d been sponsored into the dream-sharing program together. John’s father owned part of the company that sponsored them; the company owned part of the program.

Edward came by because John asked him to, something about needing the details of one of Edward’s contacts. The next mission is on partial display on a series of boards set up nearby: blueprints of a cruise ship, pictures in pale white and blue and ashy greys of a glacier hanging over a fjord, a family portrait of a severe-looking man with his wife and daughter and more pictures of that same man, briefcase in hand. The standard fare.

The PASIV device beeps ahead of John waking up. At his elbow, his phone buzzes and then intones the beginning of _Dirty Old Town_ , which Crozier’s team has been using as a wake-up call for years. John blinks, pale green eyes widening in worry when he finds someone sitting at his side, the tension draining from his body in seconds when he recognises Edward.

“Sweet dreams?” Edward asks.

John gives him a look that makes it clear how little he thinks of the joke. Then he glances down at the IV in his arm. Reaching for the case, he pulls out another one.

“Care to find out?”

Edward hasn’t used a PASIV device in weeks, and it is this maybe, rather than curiosity, that spurs him to accept the needle. John sets the timer as Edward lies down on the concrete floor, using his folded coat as a pillow. He finds the usual vein and slips the needle in.

He doesn’t know what he expected but it wasn’t this, heather and weeds and pale green grass, blue mountains shutting off the horizon like slumped and sleeping beasts. The sky is an ashy grey and the air smells like rain. A stone’s throw away squats a little stone house, with some slate missing from the roof. The two windows are gaping black holes. Edward heads off towards the house, assuming John will be inside. When he pushes open the door he finds a tranquil little nest of a room, the bed in the corner unmade, the coals glowing in the open stove. On the slanting table, made of little more than boards nailed together, the kettle is still steaming next to an upturned mug and an open book, with a piece of paper sticking out from between the pages.

 _I’ll be back soon,_ it says.

“I spent months thinking that if I tried to dream, I’d dream of Hickey,” John says from behind Edward. “I thought my dreams would be filled with projections of him, lying in wait, ready to taunt and torture me.”

John never told Edward or Crozier what had happened in that last dream they’d shared, the one from which Hickey and Charles and Solomon had absconded with the location of those airplane blueprints, toppling buildings and collapsing roads in their wake. Later on Crozier would speculate that Hickey must have tortured John to destabilise the dream, refraining from killing him so the mission wouldn’t come to an abrupt end before the mutineers had found what they were looking for. When Edward had woken up, the mark was passed out on the floor of his hotel room with a bleeding head wound, their chemist had been stabbed in the shoulder and John was holding Hickey at gunpoint. _It wasn’t personal_ , Hickey told John, and Edward had time to raise himself onto an elbow, his head still full of the rubble of an imaginary town, as Charles buried a knife in John’s back. The three men were already in the corridor when Edward set off in pursuit. He was able to fire at Hickey before the elevator doors slid shut. Both his shots missed their mark by a wide margin.

“I didn’t want to dream out of some fear that my dreams would hunt me down and inflict all manners of pain upon me until I managed to wake up,” John says. “But I was wrong.” He comes to stand beside Edward and lets his eyes sweep over the cabin, like he’s trying to commit it to memory. His hand grasps the small silver cross around his neck. “Really, what it comes down to is, I better never dream again, because then I’ll never want to wake up.”

The song reaches Edward distantly - he’s had dreams where the wake-up call seems to come from the heavens above, but this time it sounds as if John has set up an old record player in some non-existent room of the cabin. _I met my love… by the gas works wall…_

John shoves him, just hard enough to lose his balance, and Edward wakes up.

 _Dreamed a dream, by the old canal..._ John switches off the song. “Crozier doesn’t want me to dream. It’s probably wise. I’m only in charge of research. Coordination.”

“If Crozier didn’t need his point man to dream, he could have kept me on.”

Removing the needle from his arm, Edward returns the IV to the case. There’s a reassuring familiarity to the gestures: inspecting the tubes and valves and vials of Somnacin, checking that the timer is set on zero, turning off the device and closing and locking the case.

“I think Crozier genuinely believed you could do with some time off,” John says. “When was the last time you took a trip that wasn’t work-related?”

“Your dream seemed stable enough to me,” Edward tells him, a blatant change of subject that John must have noticed, but he doesn’t let on.

“A friend made this dream for me. Back when we were training in Canada. A pleasant dream that I could hide in, when the training became too… difficult to process. It’s the mountains at home, in the Cairngorms. It’s meant to make me feel safe. The idea was that… I would go home one day. Build that cabin. It did keep me sane at the time.”

Edward doesn’t ask him what became of his friend. John had bonded with a few of the techs from the program. It’s likely many of them are dead by now; the life expectancy in their field being what it is.

“Have you ever been afraid that it might happen to you?” John asks. “That you might love a dream so much you wouldn’t want to wake up?”

“Not in a very long time.”

When Edward began seeing Solomon outside of work, back when they should have known better because they’d been doing this a while, but wouldn’t listen to reason because they were too young to think of themselves as anything but powerful and the exception to every rule, they would go under for the sole purpose of having sex, six, seven, eight times in a row, the landscapes in turn lurid or bare, the only constant their inexhaustible hunger for each other and their totems on the nightstand - in the grass - on the dashboard, Edward’s compass carefully clipped to Sol’s pen knife. He’d fall asleep in dreams and wake up in dreams and when the timer finally ran out, reality claiming him once more, he rose from the floor of his flat with a headache and a parched throat, limbs heavy with the remnants of the sedative, resenting the limitations of his own body with a passion.

“I think it’s better to let go,” Edward says as he gets to his feet. John accepts his extended hand and lets himself be pulled up.

Edward considers his words carefully before he goes on.

“It might seem like a good dream, but it’ll turn against you in the end.”

John has moved over to a table and retrieved a stack of fake IDs from a locked box.

“Talking from experience, are you?” he says. “I was here for that first mission with Tozer, remember? From the day he walked in here, fresh from dream camp with that encyclopaedic knowledge of firearms, I knew he was going to be a problem.”

“Why, did he talk back at you?”

Edward keeps his tone dispassionate - it wouldn’t do to fight now, not about this.

“No, but your eyes kept following him around the room,” John grumbles, as he throws another handful of fake passports aside. “And he bloody well knew it. I get that you had that whole opposites attract thing going, but you can’t let him mess up with your head like this.”

Edward halts himself a second away from blurting out, _You don’t really know him._

John’s gaze hardens. “That dream still gives me nightmares. I wake up in the middle of the night with phantom pains from what Hickey did to me. It’ll creep up on me in full daylight, a flash of light will make me hallucinate a knife. It’s one thing they should have taught us in Canada: never trust your mind to another dreamer. If Crozier is giving you an out, maybe you should take it.”

“Remember when Crozier was still drinking?” Edward asks. “For most of that first year we worked with him. Sometimes he was so drunk we could barely put him under, and then the whole architecture of the dream was swaying around us like a ship in a storm.”

“Your point?” John asks coldly. Edward can tell it’s a facade from the way his hands shake as he tosses another fake driver’s licence onto the pile. John who’s always been terrible at lying, unless he’s lying to himself. Back in training, it used to be the easiest thing to get intel out of his projections. You needed only ask and they’d start telling long tales of loneliness and repressed yearnings, all manners of secrets that John would never have admitted to while he was awake.

“I’m afraid quitting the business won’t fix all our problems,” Edward says.

John is about to retort when the door flies open at the other end of the warehouse. Silna and Thomas don’t seem particularly surprised to find Edward crashing their mission prep. As they draw near and Edward takes in their grim faces, he begins to doubt that they’ve come here to train.

“He took Harry and Francis,” Silna says, with such an expression of abject distaste that there can be little doubt who she means.

_7\. Solomon_

Bobby Golding isn’t exactly what Solomon would define as a likable person, but then that comes with the territory. A lanky, twitchy kind of guy, he’d been a part of the program back in the Arctic, as a technician for the pharmaceutical company that bankrolled most of the experiment. Since then he’s acquired quite the network of smugglers and provided you pay him the right price, he can get you any ingredient you need to fabricate a dream: Somnacin or, if you have a knowledgeable chemist, the chemical compounds with which they’ll produce their own version of the drug; a PASIV device or the spare parts which will come together as one, and, if you’re looking for a specific contractor or dreamer and you ask nicely, he’ll point you in the right direction.

Because Cornelius greased his palm, Golding goes so far as to set up a meeting with Crozier and his chemist. To Solomon’s surprise, it all goes according to plan: once Golding’s done talking to Crozier and Goodsir, Des Voeux and Gibson step in, sedatives in hand. Solomon waits for them in a van behind the bar, and ten minutes later they come out, followed by the two gorillas Des Voeux recruited for the specific purpose of carrying two unconscious bodies from the bar to the van: Crozier’s tall and rather bulky frame, with that old jacket Solomon had grown familiar with over the years, full of pockets one of which, Cornelius used to say with unrepentant curiosity, must contain his mysterious totem; and Crozier’s new chemist, a smaller, slender man with a black beard and curls, wearing some ancient-looking cardigan.

Cornelius insisted that they get the chemist at all costs, but once they’re back in the abandoned-looking office space that Cornelius has them working (and dreaming) out of, and both Crozier and the chemist begin to regain consciousness, the chemist proves anything but cooperative.

“You can torture me,” he declares, with a commendable amount of authority for someone with so quiet a voice. “I heard you were fond of such methods. I won’t prepare any drugs for you.”

“I won’t torture you,” Cornelius says with a benevolent smile. To add to his mock sollicitude, he’s gone down in a crouch before them, his arms crossed over his knees. “I won’t have to. If you don’t help me, I’ll just torture him.”

He nods towards Crozier, whose voice comes out muffled from behind his bloody hand. Because he’d resisted as they walked in, one of the gorillas clocked him in the face. Solomon doesn’t hear what Crozier is saying, but judging from his hateful glare and the way Cornelius rocks back on his hills, his smile never wavering, it must have been a slur.

“It’s a simple thing I’m asking of you,” Cornelius tells the chemist. “Your name is Goodsir, isn’t it? Well, Dr Goodsir, you will put us under, and by us, I mean all of us here present, except yourself and Billy. Billy will keep an eye on you while Crozier gives me what I want. And Crozier being with us ensures that you won’t meddle with the dosage of the drug, although make no mistake, I do want you to put us in deep. We’ll need a much stronger dose than what you usually administer your teammates.”

“This is madness,” Crozier informs Cornelius, before he spits out a mouthful of blood. “Stealing ideas from someone’s mind implies discretion. Surprise. Or did you forget that? How are you going to steal an idea from my head when I’ll be right there beside you and well aware of what you’re trying to do?”

“I won’t have to steal anything,” Cornelius says, with a disdainful wave. “As I said, you’ll give me what I want. And if you don’t, well, I’ll just kill the both of you and find another way. Shall we proceed?”

“How about you tell me what you want first?”

Solomon has to give it to the man, Crozier doesn’t even sound rattled. Disappointed, maybe, and from the way his eyes occasionally move away from Cornelius to fix each of them in turn, Gibson lounging by the door and looking at his feet, Des Voeux sitting astride a chair and inspecting his nails, Solomon sitting on an empty desk with a rifle across his knees, looking at the scene but also through it, reluctant to take it in, to retrace the steps that have led him here on what is certain to be some moral mistake of such magnitude he’ll never recover from it, it seems that Crozier is still hoping one of them will come to their senses.

Goodsir the chemist isn’t so naive.

“There’s no reasoning with men like him,” he tells Crozier. “Haven’t you ever met any before? I’ve come across a few since I started working the field. Dream-sharing has absolved them of morals and ethics. They’ve forgotten they were governed by the laws of physics. The laws of society. He no longer sees himself as a mortal man.”

“It’s a fine speech, but ultimately pointless,” Cornelius tells him. “You’re trying to stall for time. Manson and Daly - those are the two gentlemen who brought you in - they’re currently halfway across town to drop off your phones in a gutter somewhere. If you’re counting on Little to come after you, he won’t find you.” He gives Crozier another one of those wide, closed-mouthed grins. “He’s always been loyal to you, but I wouldn’t count on him to mount a successful rescue. Leadership’s never been his forte, has it? He used to make me think of a photocopy. Here,” as he gestures towards Crozier, “we have the original, printed in full colour. And then we have your point man, the cheap black and white edition. Billy, would you help Dr Goodsir to the kitchen? You’ll find everything you need there.”

“I might need more precision than that,” Goodsir tells him with a stubborn frown.

“As deep as you can. As deep as Crozier went the last time. We’ll figure out the rest.”

“We could be trapped in there for years,” Crozier warns him as Gibson escorts Goodsir to the kitchen. Crozier’s nose has started bleeding again, and Cornelius hands him a paper tissue like he’s doing him the greatest favour. “That is, if we get out at all.”

“It’s a risk I’m willing to take,” Cornelius shrugs.

“Are they?” Crozier asks, looking from Des Voeux to Solomon.

Neither of them answers.

Part of Cornelius’ appeal was that, unlike Crozier, he affected to treat Solomon like an equal. From the moment Solomon had joined Crozier’s team, Crozier had been adamant that Solomon’s militarised approach to dream-sharing was an aberration. In Crozier’s eyes, dream-sharing was an art, a means to push the boundaries of science and architecture.

 _What they taught you in Nunavut,_ he’d told Solomon during their very first meeting, _is how to shoot an imaginary gun._

At the time, Solomon hadn’t taken it personally. Crozier was visibly drunk, tottering in his seat as he pointed at him with a hand that still held on fast to an empty whiskey glass. Crozier was a legend in the field, one of the pioneers of dream-sharing. He’d basically invented extraction - the first successful theft of an idea by means of drug-induced dreams had been performed not by soldiers but by Crozier and his then partner James Clark Ross, and for years after that extraction was known as the “Crozier-Ross Method”. The man Solomon met in London was a far cry from the genius he’d heard about.

“A drunken Irishman,” he’d confessed to Cornelius the first time they went out for a drink, at the end of a day where Crozier’s projections had drowned Edward in a murky river while Solomon watched from the top of a tower that Crozier’s drunken mind had assembled without a door, or windows, or stairs.

“It makes you wonder, doesn’t it?” Cornelius had said, thoughtful. “Maybe we’d perform just as well if he wasn’t there. Maybe we’d perform better.”

Eventually, Crozier had sobered up. He’d abruptly stopped drinking any real alcohol, while putting himself under once or twice a day to drink imaginary whiskey in his dreams. By that point however, Cornelius had already begun to plan his exit, and when he’d asked if Solomon wanted in, Solomon hadn’t spent much time mulling it over. Cornelius had never caused a dream to collapse because he was too drunk to think straight. He’d never treated Solomon like a useful but distasteful weapon. And in the midst of it all was Edward, Edward who talked of quitting someday but who spent his spare time fucking Solomon in dreams that made it seem like they’d never left the Arctic, and sometimes Solomon can’t shake the quiet certainty that they never did, and never will.

The blow Crozier received had disoriented him and he carries some of it into the dream: his nose keeps bleeding and with every other step, he trips over his own feet. Des Voeux walks close on his heels, holding the end of a chain looped around Crozier’s wrists, and Solomon brings up the rear, in the cam whites he used to wear back in Norway, and a helmet and goggles and gloves, a rifle slung over his shoulder.

“What do you want?” Crozier asks again, for what must be the sixth or the sixtieth time.

It’s only the three of them, not even a projection in sight, only the dark green spires of the trees around them and the snow sinking beneath their boots.

“You saw something,” Cornelius tells him. “It comes from deep inside our dreams. It comes for all of us, maybe it’s drawn to some feeling of primal fear. Maybe it’s death that lures it to you. Whatever it is, I want to meet it. You’ll take me to it.”

Crozier halts in his tracks. Around them and without the soft crush of their boots breaking the crust of snow, the forest is silent.

“Do you even understand what you’re after? This thing, this creature, it’s not a weapon you can control. It won’t do your bidding, not if you ask it and not if you try to force it into servitude.”

Solomon readjusts his grip on the rifle. Until now he’d assumed that Cornelius had dreamt him a weapon to keep an eye on Crozier. It’s only now that he realises it might have been meant for a hunt.

“What will happen if we meet it? What will happen if we don’t?” Crozier can be persuasive when he wants to. It was easy to dismiss him as a grumbling drunk back when he behaved like one, but when he’s sober and in full control of his own thoughts, Crozier’s power of conviction could rival Hickey’s. “With the amount of drugs in our system, the usual kick won’t be enough to wake us up. If you wander down here for too long, you’ll forget you were ever anywhere but here. Tozer could tell you about it. He must have seen it happen to his fellow soldiers. I hear there’s still a hospital wing in Canada full of test subjects who never woke up. Who’ll never wake up.”

The forest opens onto a vast plain. But for an orange fringe above a line of snow-covered mountains, the sky is unremittingly dark. Ahead of them, the shrubs dotting the plain are covered in snow like so many bones jutting from the ground. Cornelius must be mocking him, Solomon thinks, for he’s dreamt this landscape many times. It took him years to perfect it, so that it wouldn’t be a mere memory - shapeless, tasteless, discoloured - of the far north. He recognises the coldness of the air, the tricks of the ear, as an icicle breaks off a mile away and the sound carries across the silence of the dead lands to reach him where he stands.

_Where the forests end and the tundra begins._

“I assumed the creature would be more at ease in a familiar setting,” Cornelius explains. “There’s a rumour that it wasn’t something the soldiers discovered in dreams, but a monster they found in the Arctic, and carried home with them,” he taps his fingers against his temple, “in there.”

“It doesn’t matter if it was something we made or if it was there before we arrived,” Crozier says. “We weren’t supposed to meddle with it.”

“This is a dream,” Des Voeux’s voice rises from behind Crozier. Since they left the forest, he has grown ever more fidgety, his dark eyes cutting left and right as if scouting for escape routes. “You’re supposed to meddle with it. That’s the entire point.”

The farther they walk into the plain, the more Solomon hangs onto the sequence of events that led him here, like a mantra. The irony isn’t lost on him that this list - _losing Heather, betraying Edward, following Cornelius, capturing Crozier, lying down to dream in the office space, the forest, the plain_ \- is the only thing that will get him out of here alive, even as it proves that there’s no point in him trying to make it. He’d followed Cornelius because he thought Cornelius would provide him with a quicker path to an early fortune and retirement. It has become all too apparent that Cornelius will always want more, not only from his dreams but from the people around him. He was never going to let Solomon go, not after this job, not after the next. And the others - Gibson who loves Cornelius to the point where he’d forsake his own self, Des Voeux who’ll go wherever Cornelius asks him provided he can dream whatever the fuck he wants, they were never going to have any second thoughts.

Crozier looks to the side before Solomon can think to look away, and their eyes meet. Solomon could shoot him, waking him up, but then Cornelius would have them all do the same, and this confrontation will be far more dangerous outside the dream, where bullets don’t cause you to wake up.

“I can’t bring this thing to you,” Crozier says. “I never went looking for it. It found me.”

“That’s what I’m counting on!” Cornelius exclaims gaily. “That it’ll find you again.”

"Cornelius,” Solomon says, forcing the words past cold lips. “This is…”

“There!” Des Voeux shouts. “There’s something there.”

Ahead of them in the snow, a dark patch resolves itself into a hole in the ice. Impossibly, it isn’t the ground that they see when they lean forward, but water deep below, blackness shot through with flickers of light. An underground lake or river in the middle of the plain of shrivelled trees.

Solomon raises his head on instinct, having sensed rather than seen the creature’s approach. It is as white as the snow against which it moves, in a quiet, supple unfurling of its limbs, like any predator stalking its prey. It reminds Solomon of a polar bear, though the shape of it isn’t quite right, the head much larger than it should be.

“Should I shoot?” he whispers, shouldering the rifle.

Cornelius glances back, distractedly, but Solomon isn’t looking at him. Crozier shakes his head, a definite no.

The creature stops. It must be watching them though they can’t see its eyes, only the slight contrast between it’s grey bulk in the darkness, and the greyer bulk of the snow where its shadow falls. For a time the landscape, the air, the dream remain motionless.

Then Des Voeux turns abruptly on his heel and begins to run.

The creature turns its head slightly in Des Voeux’s direction, as if it were debating whether or not to pursue him. Cornelius takes a step forward.

“You’re a nightmare, aren’t you?” he smiles. “I am familiar with nightmares. They answer to me.” He cocks his head and reaches out with a careful hand. “Would you?”

Cornelius takes another step, and his entire countenance shifts. Instead of Cornelius’ short frame, his narrow shoulders and his russet-coloured hair, it is now Crozier who prepares to face the monster. A convincing copy: Cornelius has always been a talented forger.

“Remember me?” he says, with Crozier’s particular rasp. “I’m the dreamer you spared.”

The monster draws closer, head extended at the end of an unnaturally long neck. In the distance, Solomon can still hear the echo of Des Voeux’s graceless flight, of his stumbling feet breaking through the snow as he runs back towards the forest. Again he considers using the rifle, and again Crozier meets his eye, shakes his head. The creature stills an inch away from Cornelius’ hand. By now they can see the slant of its eyes and its large muzzle - then its jaws close around Cornelius’ arm, the illusion flickering an instant, Crozier’s stout figure shrinking back into Cornelius’s familiar silhouette, swelling again into someone, or something else, clothes falling away to reveal pale flesh as blood sprays upon the snow. In a few leaps and bounds and a cloud of white powder the creature vanishes, taking what was Cornelius with it, and silence settles once again upon the landscape, like a blanket falling heavy upon the stirrings of a fire.

“What was that?” Solomon asks, awed in spite of himself.

“I’ve no idea,” Crozier says. “I’ve never seen it before.”

Solomon gapes at him. “You mean this wasn’t the monster you saw?”

“I don’t know that there ever was a monster,” Crozier grumbles, moving over to stand above the hole in the ice, his hands still bound in front of him. Hickey hadn’t bothered to dream a key for the lock on the chain. “I don’t know what I saw. I couldn’t tell you if it was the same thing, or if Hickey’s mind created a monster because he wanted so desperately to meet one. I suggest we get out, now, before we forget what brought us here. It’s what happened to me the last time.”

Solomon looks back towards the forest, but nothing moves in the distance. Des Voeux’s trace seems to vanish near the edge of the trees.

“Should I shoot you?” he asks.

Crozier’s voice is gentle, with that hint of irony that Solomon used to admire.

“With what gun?”

Solomon looks down to find out the gun in his hands has turned into a long stick of polished wood. Cornelius’ parting gift. There’s a crude joke here somewhere; Heather would have laughed.

“Don’t,” Crozier says quickly, all humour vanished. “Don’t dream another one. I don’t trust what this dream might do if we try to change it. We’ll have to jump in here,” he adds, pointing down towards the hole in the ice. “Swim away from the hole and let ourselves drown. That should do it.”

“I used to dream I went back to Canada. I think I dreamt of this…” Cornelius’ blood glistens on the snow, but Solomon doesn’t feel any regret. Only a hesitant sort of relief. “Is he dead? If he died, he’ll wake up before us. He’ll be able to…”

“I don’t think he’ll wake up, and if he does, I don’t think there’ll be much of him left after this monster has eviscerated his brain. You should go first.”

Solomon tries to clear his thoughts. A pale mist has risen around them, as if to echo the numbness stealing into his limbs.

“I need you to convince Mr Gibson to stand down,” Crozier insists.

Gibson won’t be talked into changing sides, not if Cornelius is lost for good, but there’s a chance he’ll be too overcome with grief to be much of a threat.

“You’d trust me?”

“You trusted me when it came to that creature,” Crozier points out. “I hope we’ll never work together again, but I do also want the both of us to make it out of here alive.” His eyes narrow. “I don’t think your untimely death would be of much help to Edward.”

When Solomon hesitates at the edge of the hole, Crozier clasps his arm in a gloved hand. For a moment his strong grip serves as an anchor. The fog clears, and Solomon catches a glimpse of the precariousness of their situation - how far they are from reality, from their past grievances, from any sort of help beyond each other’s.

“There’s a way back,” Crozier tells him. “Find it.”

Solomon holds his breath and jumps.

_Epilogue (Solomon)_

They’ve been on the road for hours by the time Edward wakes up, shielding his eyes against the bright morning sun.

“It’s stopped raining,” he notes.

The sky above the pines might have cleared, but the wet asphalt is still slippery with rain. Edward props his feet up on the dashboard. The sides of his boots splattered with dry mud. It’s still a wonder to see him like this, laid-back in his clothing if not in his demeanour, the cuffed jeans, the sleeves shoved up to the elbows. Gone are the vests and the oxfords and the pressed trousers, all the browns that made him look like a destitute poet, all the greys that made him look like a mob boss’ prodigal son. Solomon wants to touch him and doesn’t dare, as if that would cause Edward to change his mind and ask him to turn around and make for the nearest airport. Solomon doesn’t even know where that might be; in an act of good faith, he’s left Edward in charge of the map.

“How did you sleep?” he asks.

Edward has a dispassionate smile. “I didn’t dream, if that’s what you’re asking. Maybe that’s a good thing. We’ve had enough dreams for a lifetime, didn’t we?”

“Do you think we’ll miss it? What if it’s not the same, outside of dreams?”

Edward turns to face him, his sullenness vanished, amusement in his dark eyes.

“The sex, you mean? I wouldn’t worry about that.”

 _This,_ Solomon thinks. _This is what Cornelius could never imitate properly. This impossible blend of posh arrogance and residual self-doubt._

Outside the window, where the horizon has widened, the road rises and falls before them. It seems to slither all the way to the snow-capped summits in the distance. The forest is everywhere, watched over by pylons four times the size of the trees. It’s Canada as he remembers it, from when he’d driven down through Manitoba after he’d received his medical discharge, unwilling to go home and resign himself to a life of being looked after, of being spied upon. Uncertain what to do next. This time however, Edward is with him, staining the dashboard of their rental with his dirty boots, popping mints like a kid would candy, occasionally saying things like, _Remember the time we…_ \- and they’re heading north. Solomon doesn’t know if they’re running away from London or running back to Canada, now that he thinks about it, it doesn’t seem like the brightest idea to try to escape something by heading for the place where it was invented. But it’s what Edward had wanted to do, and it feels like he owes Edward his every wish for the decade to come.

“Where are we?” he asks.

“The middle of bloody nowhere?” Edward suggests, though he does pick up the map from where it’s fallen on the floor and sets to studying it.

“Anywhere we could stop for a bit? I could do with some coffee.”

“Gas station up ahead,” Edward says, and he’s no longer looking at the map but pointing at a building in the distance, its flat roof painted red.

Solomon parks outside the station. The air smells of petrol and of the nearby pines. He breathes it in like it’s the first breath he’s taken in years and for a moment, standing there outside a truck that doesn’t belong to him, with his army rucksack full of tightly-folded spare clothes and knives, what little he thought to take, tossed in the back alongside Edward’s neat black suitcase, Edward exclaiming from the front seat, “I think I know where we are!” like he expects a medal for reading a map, Solomon thinks it’s the safest he’s ever felt, and maybe the happiest he’s ever been.

“Do you need anything?” he asks.

“I’m fine,” Edward says, looking up. He smiles like he means it.

Inside he trifles with the postcard stand while the kid at the counter watches a newsflash about a fire in a theatre in Toronto. He looks familiar in the way all rest area personnel must, a scrawny, boggle-eyed boy who must be all of sixteen, wearing an improbable ring on his finger, like he expects to get married soon. Catching Solomon looking at his hand, he blushes, and feels the need to explain, “It’s just plate.”

“Sure, mate. I’ll have a pack of Marlboro.”

The doorbell chimes. Solomon glances towards the entrance and does a double take.

“Hi, Tozer,” Heather says.

He looks exactly like he did when Solomon last saw him, his dark eyes wiser than they used to be, his beard flecked with grey, though this time he isn’t dressed like a suburban dad. The faded cap and fishing jacket over a plaid shirt are rather more suited to their current surroundings.

“How did you…” Solomon stares at him. “How?”

“Per mare, per terram,” Heather says. Words from another life. “Do you remember Norway?”

“Of course I remember Norway,” Solomon says, somewhat dumbly. “And how utterly shite you were at ice-climbing,” he adds, as the initial shock begins to wear off. “What are you doing here?”

“What did you come in here for?”

Solomon opens his mouth and closes it. Behind Heather he can see the gas pumps and the truck, Edward leaning against the door with his eyes closed, the shredded tops of the pines at his back. Behind the counter, the kid in the red and white company shirt is waiting for him to pay. Looking down he finds a postcard in his hand, of the mountains they’d seen at the end of the road. After a scrounge in his pockets, he hands some loose change over to the cashier.

“Wasn’t it too easy?” Heather says.

Solomon pockets the card, looking everywhere but at Heather, at the counter, at the ice cream cooler, at the display of postcards.

“Retrace your steps. How did you get here?”

Wrenching the words from somewhere deep inside him, Solomon answers, “We drove.”

“From where?”

Solomon shoots him a reproachful look.

“Do you remember waking up after that dream?” Heather asks. “Give it a think.”

“I remember a shore.” He rubs his eyes. “I pulled myself out. Wet all over and I was cold. Cold to the bone. There were trees everywhere, pines. Snow on the ground. I was relieved. I’d almost drowned.”

Heather’s voice is careful, gentle as he asks, “Do you understand?”

Solomon shakes his head as if it would dislodge the idea growing inside it. “How did you get here?”

“How did you?” Heather retorts. “Is this what you want? That’s not a man out there. It’s a memory of one. Let it go. And maybe it’s time you let me go as well.”

“You have a life,” Solomon says, his tone all the more forceful that he can no longer believe his own words. “It might not be real, but isn’t it better than nothing? You have a wife, children. You have a life.”

“Do I?”

Throughout their conversation, the cashier hasn’t moved, returning his attention to the tv monitor above the counter. Outside Edward raises both hands. _What’s holding you up?_ Now that Heather has pointed it out, and reluctant as Solomon may be to admit it, it does seem like a simplified version of Edward. One who would abandon his sartorial uniform, who would gamely agree to a road trip up north, who would let Solomon bear him down onto a scratchy cover in the bed of the truck, and even that memory dissolves as he tries to seize it, leaving behind it only a faint impression of Edward’s fingers digging into his back. The real Edward wouldn’t be so accommodating. He’d still be dressing up to the nines, even in some drab gas station in rural Manitoba. He would know how to read a goddamn map.

Maybe Heather is wrong. Maybe Heather is right and Solomon still won’t manage to wake up. He’ll just have to take his chances.

“I’ll see you on the other side,” he tells Heather, and looks up only long enough to take one last look at Edward, without giving himself time to consider what he’s about to lose. Edward’s stricken face is the last thing he sees - his eyes widening in horror as he rushes towards the store - as Solomon punches the kid and reaches over and under the counter, making a grab for the rifle and putting to use this knowledge of weapons that Crozier despised to make sure the bullet gets him, that this time around, he won’t wash up on the cold shore of yet another dream.

_Epilogue (Edward)_

At the end of a job, the team always parts ways. They don’t reconvene until Crozier reaches out to them; sometimes, there are other, briefer missions in the meantime, with other teams, another extractor than Crozier, but Crozier is the best in the business and difficult as he may be, the people he works with tend to converge back to him.

Usually months go by between missions, but this time Edward receives a call from Crozier two days after the end of the job he did not take a part in; two weeks after Crozier and Harry returned from Hickey’s lair, shaken but whole. This tips him off that it’s likely to be a courtesy call, rather than an offer of a new job.

When Crozier tells him he isn’t in the mood for a bar, Edward replies that he knows just the place.

Inside one of the buildings near Edward’s flat, the geometry of the architecture, grey-brown slab upon grey-brown slab, has been overrun with plants. Fronds hang from concrete balconies and palm trees stretch towards the slanted glass roof and looking through the jungle towards the tall panes, one can glimpse the ribbed silhouette of one of the high-rises outside.

“I’m glad to see you well,” Crozier says, taking in Edward’s tired features.

“You too,” Edward answers, with a sideways look at Crozier’s red-rimmed eyes, his sloped shoulders. Yet there’s also a fresh spring to his step that Edward struggles to follow. It’s always been the same with Crozier, dreams take their toll on his mind, but he emerges from them reinvigorated, as if he keeps forgetting that in reality, his body will age and decline.

They walk along an artificial river, their outerwear thrown over one arm - Crozier’s hunting jacket with its dozen pockets, Edward’s tailored suit jacket neatly folded - and with every step Edward feels the weight of the bullet in his pocket and wonders if he shouldn’t just toss it somewhere into this luxuriant maze of concrete and water and trees. Crozier wouldn’t disagree, he who has never used a totem, who fears putting his luck into something so small and so easily stolen or lost.

“John tells me the mission went well?”

“It did,” Crozier nods. “We did not get much occasion to talk, after I came back. I thought we should at least broach the subject.”

“We were looking for you in the wrong place. Silna must have told you. If I’d known Golding would turn on us…”

“Well, neither of us saw that coming. I trust you’ll find us another supplier in no time. I often find that people behave more unpredictably in real life than they do in dreams... The boy Golding turning on us after seven years of us paying him better than any of our competitors. Harry Goodsir, injecting Gibson with so much sedative I’d be surprised if the man can walk straight two weeks later.”

“How is Harry?”

“Better. I believe he spent part of his pay on a plane ticket to Canada, at Silna’s invitation. I would say he deserves the holiday, but I assume the both of them will breathe as much science as they do snow, and I’ve no doubt they’ll come back to us having revolutionised the science of dream-sharing.”

Edward turns a question around in his head, trying to come up with the best way to put it to Crozier.

“What will happen to Hickey’s team, you think?”

Crozier pretends to be absorbed in a row of cacti. “They’ll go their separate ways I suppose, now that Hickey isn’t there to hold them together. I am told our former partner Mr Des Voeux finally woke up. Fifty years in there, I doubt he’ll be going back to dream-sharing anytime soon.”

Crozier must have known that Edward wasn’t asking after Des Voeux, but he doesn’t provide any further information, and Edward doesn’t insist.

“What about you?” he asks instead. “What will you do with your time off?”

Crozier ducks to avoid the long hanging leaves of a Boston fern. “Follow Jopson’s example. Spend a few weeks reading and sipping tea before I return to swindling people.”

Reaching the end of an alley, they come up against one of the tall windows.

“You’ve made progress,” Crozier remarks. “That’s an elegant, distracting dead-end, and the loop we followed earlier was difficult to spot.”

“I go to the conservatory every Sunday. The real thing has about… 800 species of plants.” Edward looks back towards the teeming jungle that they’ve just waded through. “I’m at about 120 so far, which is decent but not quite enough variety given the space, and if you start looking hard enough, you notice the repetitions.” He strokes the back of his fingers against a nearby Boston fern. “I’ll get there in time. Overall, it’s been a good exercise. It keeps me focused, my mind doesn’t wander. I haven’t lost control over a dream in a few days.”

“Speaking of,” Crozier says. “I might have a job for us, when we get back. Do you remember James Fitzjames? The background check for Polar Energies?”

“If this is about the Russian palladium mining company that Polar Energies has a grudge against, I had a meeting with Jane Franklin last month and told her we wouldn’t do it. They should hire a Russian team - I gave her a way to contact Yulia, although it’ll be at their own peril.”

“This is different. Fitzjames got in touch with me. He wants us to build him a dream.”

Edward raises his eyebrows. “That’s unusual. Will we do it?”

Looking up at the canopy above their heads, Crozier almost looks hopeful.

“If this goes well,” he says, “we might get more jobs of that sort. Of course I want us to discuss it and we’ll make the decision together. But the way I see it, it’s the kind of work we were meant to do.”

“Builders and explorers,” Edward remembers.

“Precisely,” Crozier smiles.

Edward walks Crozier to the underground and ambles back to his flat.

It was Crozier who’d told him, all those years ago, _Dreams won’t help us avoid the inevitable. They’re just a way we found to delay it, a moment longer._

On his way back, he picks up the mail, ripping up the top of the heavy envelope as he climbs the stairs, going still as the compass tumbles into his hand, as worn as he remembered it, still pointing infallibly north.

The envelope also contains a scrap of paper that merely reads, _Dreamt of you._

Edward shakes his head, in fondness or in annoyance he couldn’t say, but he takes the rest of the steps two at a time, and when he’ll get through the door he’ll snatch a page from his notebook and write, _I missed you_ or _Fuck you_ or,

_How about we give the real world a shot?_


End file.
